Thread: WILD attempts leading to random lucidity later on in sleep + the balance of maintaining it

I've recently attempted the WILD method again after a few years of just letting lucid dreams come to me randomly and infrequently. How long does it generally take? I was able to get into what I would call quite a deep meditation where I could only feel numb tingling limbs and my head/face but I think I was thinking about what I was trying to do too much instead of relaxing. This lasted around half an hour after which I woke up then I went back to sleep a while later.
Today I tried again with a more relaxed approach but ended up falling asleep fairly quickly.
Both of these attempts were after a number of hours sleep and having got up and gone back to bed.

The interesting thing is that both times so far have actually led on to me to become lucid during normal dreams in the sleep that followed. Maybe it's just the intention to have lucid dreams and having thought about them for so long before sleep that caused that though rather than anything else. I've never used reality checks or anything like that it either just happens or my dream self notices something odd and realises spontaneously.

I've decided to start focusing on lucid dreams more often again now and just wanted to share my experience and see if anyone else has had a similar one, I guess I'm also wondering if WILD could be a good method for me to keep working at or not.

One thing I've noticed in these dreams are that because I'm in a lighter sleep than I normally would be and I'm conscious in them I can partially feel my body, particularly my real eyes behind my dream eyes, and I get paranoid that I'm going to accidentally control my real body or open my eyes, and I wonder if my real body is ok and if it's lying still or moving e.t.c. By thinking about my real body too much I feel that I weaken or jeopardise the dream.
A lot of the time my lucid dreams will start with my dream body getting out of bed, and it feels really heavy and hard to balance for the first few moments, making me question whether that's because I'm really sleep-walking or something! That is never the case though.

I've been able to keep a lucid dream going for a good few minutes at a time but they always eventually visually fade out to black and then end after a struggle to keep going. Today I kept going by feeling my way around the environment using touch and smell until I got my vision back which is progress on that problem. I have to continually really focus on things to keep them in mind though and stop them fading away, but if I try that too hard and worry about losing the dream then it will fade more quickly.

I suppose it is a balance I need to strike between remembering to focus on staying in the dream while remaining calm and trying not to worry about it. Any sort of panic or excitement, that included, seems to end things. What's your experience of this balance & losing lucidity is it a quick/instant thing or do you have that problem too?

Sorry for the long post, noticing a lot of things and have a lot of ideas at the moment!